CHAPTER XVI
Forbidden World
THE FRONTIER of the Solanr System! A vast and gloomy darkness, a region of eternal night remote by six billion trackless miles from the far, bright star of the sun. A cold and awful immensity of space beyond which stretches only the shoreless sea of the interstellar void.
Yet even out into these far, dark spaces reached the invisible grip of the sun, to hold the outermost of its planetary children. Out here in eternal silence and darkness, far from the flaming orb that gave it birth, solemnly moved the dim world of Erebus on its slow, stupendous patrol.
A ship was moving out through the colossal dark toward the last planet. It was moving at tremendous speed under inertia, yet it seemed merely to be crawling through the vast emptiness as it held its course toward the dim, slowly enlarging sphere of Erebus.
Joan Thorn peered fixedly from the window of the control-room at the mysterious world ahead. It was like a little ghost-world, shining in the dark vault with a feeble blue light.
'It must have an extraordinarily high albedo to reflect so much sunlight at this distance,' Thorn muttered.
'Yes, it's cursed queer,' Sua Av agreed, frowning intently.
Beside the Planeteers, who had discarded their Saturnian disguises, old Stilicha Keene peered forward, a haunting apprehension in her faded eyes. The space dog crouched at her feet.
Gunda Welk was at the eyepiece of the ‘scope, staring toward dim Erebus. The towering Mercurian turned to Thorn.
'Cheerly's ship isn't in sight, Joan,' she rumbled. 'She must already have landed on Erebus.'
Thorn's brown face contorted in agonized emotion.
'We should have overtaken her!' she cried, her voice raw and self-accusing. 'If we'd put on a little more speed—'
'But girl, the Venture's been at top speed in all the long days since we left Saturn!' Stilicha quivered. 'It's been like a nightstallion voyage, with the power-chambers throbbing to the limit, and my crew getting more scared each day, and us sailin’ on toward God knows what on that world ahead!'
It had, indeed, seemed like a strange dream to all of them as their craft had, for days, crept out into the trackless, forbidding immensities. Stilicha's pirate crew had whispered fearfully, only the hope of rescuing their idolized boy leader keeping them from mutinying. An alien chill gripped all except Joan Thorn.
Thorn had become more and more feverishly anxious each day, as she thought of Jen Cheerly speeding on with Lann to seize the precious radite—the radite whose taking would signal Lann's death and the launching of Trask's attack on the Alliance!
'Shall I try the spectro-telescope?' Gunda was asking. 'We're near enough to Erebus for it to detect the radite.'
Thorn nodded quickly. 'The radite should show up clearly. I'll check our aura again for Cheerly's ship.'
Thorn snapped on the aura. But something was wrong. The aurachart did not come on. The device was dead.
'What the devil?' Sua Av muttered astonishedly. 'Something must be jamming the ether to kill our aura like that.'
'All our other instruments are dead, too!' burst out Stilicha, looking up worriedly from the panel. 'The gravitometers and space-sextants and even the audio!'
'Is it some trick of Cheerly's?' Sua Av cried.
'It couldn't be—he wouldn't have power enough to jam the ether like this,' Thorn declared.
Gunda Welk swung around from her instrument, her massive face puzzled.
'Joan, there's something wrong with this spectro-telescope, too,' she said. 'I adjusted its limits to the field of radioactive elements, but all of Erebus still shows up in it.'
Old Stilicha looked anxiously from the faintly shining blue ghost-world ahead, to the puzzled Planeteers.
'We'll soon be close to Erebus,' the old pirate said. 'What are we going to do? Land and hunt for Lann on foot?'
There was lurking terror in her faded eyes as she made the proposition, yet she kept her shrill voice steady.
'We dare not just sail in and land,' Thorn muttered. ‘It might mean the end of us, right there.'
Her face worked. 'Yet we daren't lose time either! If Lann had only been able to tell us the secret.'
'Joan, remember what Cheerly told Trask in. our cell on Saturn, after she'd got the secret from Lann!' Sua Av said eagerly. 'That she'd learned from Lann that there was only one spot on Erebus where women could land without meeting a ghastly fate!'
'One spot, but where is it?' Gunda demanded. 'There's no use of our hunting for that spot, for we wouldn't know it if we saw it.'
'Yes, we would know it!' Thorn cried suddenly. 'Cheerly's ship would have landed in that one safe spot. If we can find where Cheerly has landed here, we can land safely beside her!'
She swung around to Stilicha Keene. 'We'll reduce speed and circle around Erebus looking for Cheerly's ship. Don't go lower than a hundred miles above the surface.'
Unutterable tension gripped the Planeteers and the old pirate as the Venture swept in closer toward the mysterious planet from which only one woman in all history had returned. Erebus slowly expanded ahead, a small world hardly larger than Mercury. At last the ship dropped to within a hundred miles of its surface.
It was a strangely luminous planetscape they looked down upon, a world shimmering everywhere with the dusky blue radiance they had noticed from afar. They had thought that faint luminescence a trick of reflected sunlight, but they saw now that it was somehow inherent in this world. Through that dusky blue haze they looked down upon a weirdly forbidding landscape.
Low, jagged, barren mountains rose like fangs bared at the dark, star-studded sky. Beyond their rocky slopes stretched dim deserts, wide blank wastes upon which moved little whirls of dust. And all this dreary landscape of eternal twilight was wrapped in the uncanny faint blue radiance.
'It's queer, the way it all shines,' muttered Sua Av. 'But I can't see anything dangerous down there.'
'There's something dangerous there—terribly so,' Thorn said tautly. 'If there weren't, this world wouldn't have swallowed up so many hundreds of explorers in the last nine centuries!'
'There's air of some kind down there, anyway,' old Stilicha quavered. 'See them there whirling dust-devils?'
'But there can't be an atmosphere here!' Gunda declared. 'That would mean that Erebus is comparatively warm, and what would keep it warm at this distance from the sun?'
'Everything about this world is wrong, somehow,' Thorn muttered. 'The way it shines, its warmth and atmosphere, the way our instruments went dead when we neared it.'
The Three Planeteers For All Page 26
